Artistic representation of the naked one
The representation of naked the in art indicates, rather than the subject represented itself, a form of art which tries to recreate an image of the magnifié human body, idealized, while respecting the esthetic requirements and morals of the time, through the Peinture, the Sculpture or maintaining the Photographie.
The naked term “ ” belongs to the vocabulary of the Art schools since the 17th century. Through the history it was the mirror of the psychological, philosophical implications and esthetics of the body in companies given; this exercise constantly renewed is an attempt which, by a significant way, defines the human being, often in its “natural” meaning.
Since the Prehistory, the Représentation of naked bodies is one of the major topics of the Art.
The naked one of the Prehistory
The evolution of the human being was accompanied by a progressive distance of the state of nature, in particular by the clothing which is specific to the human being. One can see in the representation of the naked human being, i.e. reduced to his nature to even be carnal, the implicit will to find his origins or to find answers to a complex existence.
The first appearance of nudity in arts is concomitant with that of art itself. Pictorial and carved works informed us about the report/ratio which the men of this time had with their body. One of the best examples of it is the representation of the woman and the expectant mother. Most of the time, they are potelées and strong, symbols of fruitfulness and opulence: this kind of representation can be interpreted like a mystical step in order to attract these known as fruitfulness and opulence (art and belief being then very dependant). Moreover, beauty and survival were strongly associated: as in the animals, the partner the best bearing one, that in better health was that which was likely the most to survive and to be the best parent.
In the representations of women, the face and the details are minimized whereas centres, the belly (fertile) and the sex are accentuated, exaggerated. Certain neurologists estimate that the human brain (as that of certain animals) is attracted by the exaggerations; this would rather explain this kind of primitive representations as well as the attraction of the public for certain works of art (exaggerated) than for others. Exaggerated representations of certain parts of the body make also their appearance (mainly Phallus). The exaggeration can also be simply included/understood like the average first and volunteer to indicate the importance of an element.
In its speech for the annual public meeting of the November 24th 2004 of the Académie of the Art schools (whose topic was this year there “the naked one”) the perpetual secretary Arnaud d' Hauterives pointed out that “except for some prehistoric Venus statuettes like that of Willendorf, with the heavy centres and the disproportionate hips, except for some diagrammatic representations of hunters on the walls of the caves, the first naked ones of the history of Art are Greek, and they are men. ”
Antiquity
Art develops in the Antiquité at the same time as civilizations and the appearance of the writing. The artistic topics and currents diversify according to civilizations.
In Egypt first of all, the representation is very codified (probably translating a need for social order). The bodies are represented according to a diagram of precise proportions; the artists used a grid of proportions before carrying out the drawing, which gives a standardization of the representations in all the places (temples, tombs, palate) and in time (over one period of several centuries, there is no major change). The representations of equipped bodies are then prevalent (at least in religious and official paintings).
Contrary to coding and of an Egyptian nature, Greek art later then appears Roman. The Greeks will pay an great attention to the body, especially male, with its maintenance and the beauty, perceived as crowned. Between the antiquated Kouros, which point out the hieratic Egyptian installations, and the hellenistic sculpture which plank the portrait, of many artists fixed the guns of the naked masculine. Their gods become anthropomorphic and, with the wire of time, their carnal representations are increasingly precise.
The Greek artists study in a meticulous way the anatomy and the proportions, and the fixed representations make place with increasingly realistic images. Generations after generations, the parts of the body are accurately reproduced. One sticks then to the movement and the more natural installations. For that, one avoids the symmetry of the movements (by the contrapposto ). The representations of Apollo, Greek Venus and other models by these artists thus imposed their guns of beauty and harmony, which will be redécouverts and glorifiés by the artists of the Renaissance.
The anatomical efforts and the progression of the techniques of sculpture bring then to an apogee of realism in the representation of the naked one. One notes however thereafter a return to the natural instinct of exaggeration of the body. The artists emphasize certain parts and certain muscles, and others minimize some (the gun of the small penis which prevailed at the time is an obvious example, the disappearance of the vulvar slit in is another, this one remaining however usually present in the Indian sculpture, for example). It will be noted that the statues or decorations of pottery comprising a representation of Phallus in erection, of an oversize size, rather current at the time, are known as ithyphallic . One will find these representations later in painters Japan board like Hokusai or Tsukioka Settei. Concerning the women, when the Fesse S are particularly development, a statue is known as callipyge (which has beautiful buttocks).
See also: Greek Sculpture
The Middle Ages
The Moyen-âge does not like to represent the naked one, undoubtedly because of the quasi-exclusive use of art to fine nuns. Indeed, the naked one is for the Middle Ages a recall of the condition mortal and imperfect of the man, in connection with the Original sin .
It should not be believed however that there does not exist any naked in the art of the Middle Ages: it on the contrary is frequently represented, for iconographic reasons. For example in the representations of the hells on the tympanums of the churches, one frequently finds characters naked, of which the genitals are devoured by scratch, of the snakes, of the scorpions… Sometimes in the same way, the representations of Adam and Eve take (but not always) the form the naked ones: thus, Adam of Notre-Dame de Paris, currently preserved at the museum of Cluny, is represented naked, and very near to the ancient gun. The Renaissance of 1200 is indeed one of the factors of development of naked (masculine mainly).
In the crowned imagery, nudity however remains rare, and the 15th century should be waited so that a certain relaxation takes place. Thus, in splendid the Breviary of Marie of Savoy , realized with Chambéry, between 1400 and 1450, one notes the presence of many naked small children in the margins. One observes the appearance of virgins nursing, rather in the sculpture that in painting, as the reactions made indignant of certain ecclesiastics prove it in front of the Virgin with the child of Jean Fouquet whereas stone Virgins showed their center at the 14th century already. That does not prevent the miniaturists of the Très Rich Hours of the duke of Berry and other manuscripts of the same time to represent the naked ones when they for of test the need.
An interesting evolution is that of the representations of Jesus child: its body starts to be revealed as from the 13th century, but it is represented naked only starting from 1400 approximately.
Rebirth
It is obviously on the Art of the Antiquité that the Masters Italy NS founded their esthetic guns, but the art of the Renaissance however followed its own advance, with different supports (painting on fabric, Fresque, Sculpture) and a great number of technical innovations (the Oil-base paint, the linear prospect, the Sfumato, the Trompe-l'oeil,…), which confers particular characteristics to him. The naked body is represented primarily in works on mythological topics (see opposite Lucas Cranach Old the, “ Venus upright in a landscape ” (1529) or Agnolo Bronzino, “ Venus and Cupid ” (v. 1540 - 50)) or religious.
With the Rebirth, the naked one becomes a subject with whole share and expresses a new Esthétique, in which the artists represent the evolution of the company. At the beginning, the bodies are particularly corpulent (fat) because one wished to show that one entered a new era of opulence and especially because the desire first of the humanistic was to place the man in the center of the universe. Later, the fat bodies left the place to muscular bodies. The bodies, also fixed at the beginning, evolved/moved following the example those of the Antiquité. These two characteristics (musculature and movement) were improved by the study of the old Masters but especially by anatomical research on alive models or corpses (as did it Léonard de Vinci). The naked female one, while expressing an ideal of beauty, starts to translate a erotism, which will pose some problems in the reception of works because of mentalities which were not ready to accept this type of representation.
The artists had to find all kinds of stratagems so that nudity is not shocking and the rejection of work does not involve. Either the installation itself masked what one did not want to show, or a more or less convenient mask-sex was largely employed, as much on the sculptures that in painting: it was either a piece of fabric, or a more clever element and fig tree or vineleaf (as on Adam), sometimes like the hair (for Birth of Venus of Botticelli).
The first naked one painted by Botticelli is male. It is about the naked body of the Assyrian general Holopherne discovered decapitated by his aide-de-camps, second panel of a diptych whose left panel shows the return of Judith followed by her maidservant carrying the head of the general in a basket. The second naked one of the same painter, masculine also, is a Sebastien Saint bored of arrows, shown in foot related to a column, and to which, for the first time, Botticelli remarks a double arabesque. In these two works, the sex of the character is dissimulated under convenient veils. In " Birth of Vénus" , panel paints ten years later, the goddess is represented naked of face, in foot, life size. Ordered by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, relative of Laurent de Médicis, as during " Triumph over Printemps" (whose Splendid one, its tutor, had made him gift), this table was intended to decorate its villa with Castello, near to Florence. Only could admire it the friends of its owner, the neoplatonicians amateurs of mythology gréco-Roman and often ancient collectors of statues, that nudity could not shock. Botticelli represents in this work modest Venus, whose attitude is probably inspired by a Roman low-relief. It shows the goddess under the features of Simonetta Vespucci, in spite of the fact that this young woman had died for at least eight years when it painted of her this idealized portrait and very stylized! Goddess of the beauty and the love, naked Venus of Botticelli is on the contrary very pure, covering with a hand the chest, dissimulating other her pubis behind a wick of her long hair floating with the wind. Moreover, the painter blurred the point of the centres and the navel of his Venus, and it gave him moreover one glance dreamer which removes any ambiguity of the spirit of the spectator. Far from to have wanted to paint a " Come Erotica" , Botticelli painted the " Come Humanitas" the Platonic ones, for which the contemplation of the beauty gave to the men an indication of divine perfection. A copy of the central figure of the " Birth of Vénus" was carried out cutting out on a brown bottom by the workshop of Botticelli, models of which was to be inspired later on Lorenzo di Credi to paint its own Vénus". Botticelli painted the female naked last later approximately twenty years, " Vérité" of its " Calumny of Apelle" , for which it took again the silhouette of Simonetta Vespucci such as it had represented it in its " Birth of Vénus" , the body observing the same double arabesque, a hand raised to indicate the sky, the other hand dissimulating moderately its sex.
Giorgione painted, after Botticelli, first naked the female important one of the Rebirth (see below). It is still about Venus, deadened in a landscape. The goddess is represented, but is lengthened either upright, of face, her head resting with the hollow of her arm, the other arm marrying the curve of the hip to come to dissimulate the pubis. Titien will take again this installation later twenty-five years, while transposing it in an interior.
The Venus of Lorenzo di Credi - painted towards 1490 - represents a nude woman upright on a dark bottom. This character is a manifest copy of the central figure of the Venus Birth de Botticelli, to this close Lorenzo di Credi used a pallet hotter than that of Botticelli, than it gave to his goddess a head inspired of the Roman statuary, and than having removed with this fact long hair of Venus de Botticelli thanks to which this one could dissimulate its pubis, it equipped his Venus with a veil whose falling down end holds place of mask-sex. One will note Lorenzo di Credi preserved the very elegant one doubles arabesque of the body of the goddess of Botticelli, movement which then justified by the fact that its Venus is held in unstable balance on a moving shell, is not explained any more for Venus de Lorenzo di Credi. If, in this case, one cannot consider that the painter added this superfluous veil by decency but by need have regard to his model, it is certain that veils having vocation of mask-sex were actually added, sometimes afterwards, with certain anatomies, as those which were affixed, after the Concile of Thirty, on the sexes of the characters of the last Jugement of the Chapelle Sixtine. The painter Daniele da Volterra who achieved this work gained there the nickname of “culottier of the pope”.
Nevertheless, one notes variable solutions as for the representation of the sexes (especially male). Indeed, the current of the religious subjects, promoted by the official patronage of the Church, clashed with a neo-classic private patronage which appreciated the mythological subjects, like the Médicis, with frequent compromises in the private collections of certain ecclesiastics.
As there was no mask-sex, often the sex was prépubère, with the ancient manner. It is some times difficult besides to differentiate the children, teenagers and adults insofar as the musculature corresponds neither to the face nor with the sex (as in works of the Caravage or Michel-Angel). But some did not embarrass these suitabilities, like the David of Michel-Angel or the Persée of Cellini, exposed to the glances on the public place as of their creation.
The Rebirth brings also the appearance of representations of children in a realistic way, in rupture with the representations of the Middle Ages where they were generally represented like adults in miniature, with faces of adults. The representations of Jesus child are innumerable.
Certain naked of the Rebirth were censured, either by the artists with the orders of the silent partners, or later by the descendants of the owners of works. It is in particular the case of a fresco of Masaccio (opposite) on which the sexes of the two characters were covered with sheets of fig tree two centuries later (and removed at the time of the last restoration).
Baroque art and Mannerism
In right-hand side line of the rebirth, the Baroque art and the Maniérisme introduce a systematic exaggeration into the installations, the style and the feelings given to the subjects represented. The motivation of the painters is not obligatorily any more the research of almost anatomical realism (this one was already reached). Thanks to the Clearly-obscure introduces by Caravage, then Rembrandt, the bodies and the flesh are detached from now on second-plans and are enlightened like never before. One does not hesitate to show ravaged, counterfeited or tortured bodies, like Laocoon of the Greco or the innumerable representations of Christ.| Random links: | Marestmontiers | Balancelle | Scenario of roleplay | Season 2001-2002 of the FC Atlantic Nantes | RS-502 | Tumeur_de_foie |